Actually, that's not true. The "use Steam" probably means having Steam enabled achievements, "cloud" storage for things like game saves, etc. Steam is more than just a content delivery method. You see, one could sell a box game at retail that has Steam support. The retails are complaining that selling such games will drive awareness of Steams sales channel.

Now, I agree with the part that retails complaining about digital downloads and "banning" said games is like biting the hand that feeds you. Go ahead! Ban the games! You'll soon have nothing to sell in your stores and customers will *still* know how to get the game they want.

What's next? Retails QQing about WoW: Cataclysm is being offered as a direct sale from Blizzard with the benefit of no-installation, retail per-order lines, etc? The only thing you miss is: a) CE editions and b) the "party" a store might throw.

In other words, if a game store says "We're not going to sell Warcraft if you offer direct sales!" do you really think WoW players will notice? They'll get their game one way or another. The one thing game companies have done is offer company specific in-game times. To continue to use WoW as an example, they might offer a "Best Buy" or "Target" tabard if you pre-order the game through those stores. I've seen that before on some games. The "Wal-Mart" colored armor set, etc. To avoid the immersion perspective, it oftne times just translates into "an armor set unique to retail store X" which is usually the same as other stores but with a different color shade.

That way, "fans" of said store can feel equally motivated to get it from them.

Anyhow, I should disclaimer that I like Steam, I use Steam and I do enjoy very much their specials and convenience. I also had CATA pre-ordered, but just went and bought the digital update from Blizzard and canceled my pre-order. It will save me a trip to the store and generating packaging waste.

To be fair, I'm also just not a Cheddar eater. =) It's possibly why I call a lot of it bland.

I've had some really good 5-year and 10-year aged Cheddar, but the stuff is just too expensive for me to care to buy given my lack of care for the type of cheese.

Anyways, I'm a fan of French cheese as you can see in my aforementioned "cheese buffet" I had at my wedding.

Unfortunately, I don't think we ever thought of taking photos of the full spread. The worst part of my night, I never got to enjoy the cheese. hehe. I had a full plate but was to busy socializing that it up and walked away on me before I could have some.

If I'm ever in England, I'll try to remember to look you up. I'd like to try some of these fabled cheddars. =)

Cheers!

Disclaimer. I was born and raise in Wisconsin. In fact I still live here. I went to London for a year for school and married a French women. I've spent lot of time in France, a country that prides itself in cheese. In the US, Wisconsin prides itself for it's dairy products, including cheese.

I wouldn't go that far. It's certainly not as good as Europe, but there are reasons for the lack of variety and therefor flavor in cheese.

That's because it's not awful, it's good. The problem is that cheddar simply is a bland cheese. Of course, you do have to find the good stuff. What cheese lover really gets existed over *chedder*?! lol It can go great on burgers (I still prefer swiss) but it's simply a dull cheese and that's not Wisconsin's fault. It's just as bad in Chedder England.

It has to do with milk pasteurization laws. It prevents a lot of cheeses from being made. Lots of them goat cheese. That's why goat cheese in the US is always the same terrible crappy stuff and why you never see the variety of cheese you have in Europe. It has really grown to be a cultural thing.

But likewise, these same laws are the reason you don't see boxes of milk on store shelves, outside of refrigeration units. I was confused the first time I was in France at my wife's house and I had some cereal for breakfast. She had me pull a box of milk from the pantry. I thought all milk had to be kept refrigerated. Then we talked with the shop owner of Nalaa's cheese in Green Bay. He explained the pasteurization laws and why we can't get the good variety of cheese here and how he was limited on what he could import and sell.

American's who haven't spent much time outside of the US simply don't get exposed to what's out there. And those that do, might not be brave enough to ever try it because some of that cheese simply smells like a rotten skunk carcass in the Texas heat, but tastes like the heavens. But many people won't get past that smell. Case in point, we've turned many of my friends onto Rachlette cheese. That's not as pungent as some goat cheeses, but some had some real reservations of ever trying it. It smells up the kitchen when cutting it (who cut the cheese? There's a reason for that phrase).

Of course, one of the biggest complements at my recent wedding (in France) was the fact that we had a cheese buffet. A table with over 30 types of cheeses on it. You've never seen American's so confused and pleased. I shocked one of my friends to go and eat every kind of cheese he could find.

It really is a cheese repression.

Now, beer. Microbrews have really come a long way to pass by the basic Miller and Bud products we have. You can find some pretty good tasting beer in Wisconsin. New Glarus, Leienenkugels, Capital Brew, etc. are good beer. It's also much more expensive and in a place like Wisconsin where quantity can seem more important than quality, you'll find people still turn to Miller or Bud Light. And when you're use to drinking bland for so long, having something with flavor becomes too much of a shock.

I think the UK has a better quality average, but the US also suffers from gimmicks. There's a billion beer makers with a billion private label beers each trying to sound like their beer is something new or different. This one has LIME! This one has LEMON! This one is called "Fat Squirrel", this is "Moose Drool", oh, look, a Monty Python branded beer! Here's a Pumpkin beer!

*sigh*

It's complicated.

Point is, Wisconsin doesn't have crap for cheese. What they do make is good, but what they do make really isn't good cheese to begin with. You can thank US laws and now US culture as it's become ingrained there. Heck, people think Velveta is "good" cheese. My French wife nearly died when she saw Mac & Cheese come in a package... dried powder. People actually *like* individually wrapped cheese. There's this sad state of American food were people are drawn to processed foods.

I think it was a Moose.

I never even finished my 30 day "free" game time upon game launch.

• Only one *starting* area had any polish. The rest were hacked together filler space.
• Class Abilities were buggy. The White Lion class (I think that was the name) was all about positional attacks. A lot of your abilities were worthless in PvE because you couldn't ever get to the side/back of the enemy. Not encouraging when you're playing the first 10 'intro' levels.
• AI was buggy. Mobs couldn't reach you, they'd start running the most bizzare pathing, and this included your pet AI.
• Limited class selection and customization. To be fair, this was probably more about the Warhammer license and their restrictions, but if your game is going to be limited like this, the rest of the game has to really shine.
• Class balance was off the charts bad. This game was highly PvP focused and if you have class balance that bad, you've really failed. PvE balance was light-years worse, but you could at least write that off because of the PvP focus of the game. But those first 10 levels, again, set the impression and if one class is solo-killing 4-5 monsters several levels higher than you and your class is getting owned by 2 equal level characters... you start to feel put-off.
• Missing classes. If I recall correctly, they took out the "tank" classes from the game at the last moment (days before release?) because they simply weren't ready yet. I'm sure there's some press release out there (I recall reading it) that announced that the "tank" classes were coming.

It wasn't all bad. I really liked the "social quests" thing. Where, all of a sudden mobs would spawn and "attack the town" and anyone in that area could help kill the mobs and all get rewarded for helping, instead of fighting against each other to finish each individuals quest requirements.

The class concepts were interesting. But as TFS states, it definitely was pushed out the door WAAAAY too soon in terms of benefit too the game. But the problem is, it would have taken another year to have polished the game to meet the bar of, say, Warcraft and I imagine that company simply wasn't going to keep dropping money into a hole.

What that has to do with SW:TOR, I'm not sure. Bioware has a lot of funds thanks to their high-grossing titles that they're still releasing (Dragon Age and Mass Effect for example) that can keep funding a project until it's ready. On top of publisher support (EA) as well as Lucas Arts support (how many art concepts and designs are coming from them? How much 'content' is mostly already established thanks to KotOR?) To be fair, again, KotOR 2 wasn't good for Bioware.

And I've been following SW:TOR for a while. I can say they definitely appear to be doing a lot of design decisions right. That is, until I heard they're trying to shoe-horn space combat and regular ground combat into the "Vanilla" game. *shudder* That's never turned out well so far.

And to be further critical... I saw the first game-play footage they showed for, I think, E3? It really, really didn't look very impressive. It was *way* to standard MMORPG when it needs to be -->STAR WARS

Of course, I say this, but I really don't have much of a solution to avoid it expect making it more action/hack&slash RPG than the standard RPG. It's, no doubt, not an easy thing to do or there would be a ton of awesome MMO's people could choose from... instead of WoW and then Niche MMO 1, Niche MMO 2 and "Hey Look! Everyquest is still around and releasing a new XPAC!" LOL, I wouldn't be surprised if EQ1 has more players than EQ2. =P

Warhammer sucked because it was, obviously, released WAY too soon. There was only one zone with any reasonable polish (the one with the burning Windmill), classes weren't complete, **STARTING** zones were so buggy you couldn't complete quests. The bugs go on...

As TFS states, this is why I know so many people tried and left the game within days/weeks and not renewing past their 'free' 30 day included play time.

There was some good parts of the game that you could see the potential... but it wasn't cutting it.

Fact of the matter is, there's just much better choices out there than to release a sub-par game. And MMO's cost WAY to much that some people just don't comprehend what it takes.

This is something I had to learn (I change my own oil on both my and my wife's car as well as air filter... not spark plugs though).

Most cities will have a municipal yard you can drop off oil, big pieces of stuff (often metals that can be recycled), and particularly big lawn trimmings (branches, bushes, etc).

Also, (I don't recall if it's Federal or State) we are recycling computer/electronic parts. All of which have to be dropped off at the city "dump" (see municipal yard).

Call your town hall, ask them where you can do it. I'd say check their website but I never have an easy time finding that kind of information on a government website. Usually they'll have a big bin to dump the oil in or a place to leave the old oil jugs (if you put the dirty oil back into the new oil containers).

Hope that helps

ST:O was something I was interested in at one point, and for a while I made a point of trying out most 'big' MMO releases, but I skipped this one.

With that said, how is their AI "dumb as shit" different than any other MMO? There hasn't been an MMO that I've played that has smart AI. All NPC's simply do is "aggro PC, take direct path between PC and NPC neglecting most boundary pathing and obstacle, and auto attack, cast spell/ability when not on cooldown".

Boss AI? Nothing but a scripted event. "at x% health, move to this location and spit out this dialog, and follow new pattern." Not something I would really classify as AI, as some sort of 'thinking', or probably better defined as reacting, animate.

And I believe this to be the case, though I'm no expect, simply because having any kind of 'smart AI' would be a pretty big resource drain on the server, that's trying to manage a lot of world events already, without having to add more CPU cycles to learn a NPC to react appropriately.

So, I'm curious, what made ST:O's ground combat AI so much worse? I don't deny it was bad, I'm just curious as how one defines it given the general lack of AI in this genre.

I saw Avatar in 3D and wished I saved $5 and saw it in 2D. Oh, I enjoyed the film but I really didn't like the 3D. If anything, it took something away from the film by having to wear these heavy bulky glasses the whole time and some of the blurry-ness. Crap-tastic. There's one film I'm going to be willing to see in 3D and that will be the new Tron and I'll be finding an IMAX to see it in too.

But I'll certainly be picking which films I'll be willing to see in 3D and be going with as many 2D options as possible.

While I wait for the /.-ed website to load, I will give the one movie that bothered me when it came to "technology", 2012.

Ok, it was 2012. We're not talking a movie that doesn't have holes the size of planets in the logic. But suspending disbelief (and to just watch the eye candy of CGI), it came down to the Arcs. Here all the main characters are, standing on the bridge of one of the Arcs and they're talking about calculating the time when the big wave will hit them and someone notices an error and needs to recalculate the impact count-down clock...

The DIGITAL clock doesn't just instantly flip to the new time... no! That would be too modern. It has to quickly speed down from the current time to the new, shorter time. With, appropriate sound effects making it sound like a mechanical clock. Ok, I got a kick out of that.

Of course, the other movie I got a kick out of... was Avatar. Sure, there's all kinds of things people can point out about this film when it comes to the science of it all, however, the one thing I loved was how these Avatars (which apparently cost so much money it couldn't be mentioned) didn't have a GPS tracking chip in them. That seems like the most logical thing to embed in this thing... you know, just in case it gets lost.

Something I always wondered about Steam but never bothered looking up. If I have a laptop and a desktop. Steam installed on both. Can my wife play one game on the laptop (say, Plants vs Zombies) and I play another game on the desktop (say, Left 4 Dead 2)? Or will Steam just fail to log the second system in because it's already seeing the first system logged in?

Searched YouTube

This made me think of a recent news article... it's not Korea, but China, it's not an MMO but an FPS, but it does involve an internet cafe and "trouble". Some poor kid got a kitchen knife through the temple and survived. It's pretty fascinating.